[UPDATE] LinkedIn is suffering an outage after being hit by a "DNS issue", causing its Web site to be offline for at least half a day. The company says the fault was not caused by hackers but by an error on the part of its domain service provider, confirming previous suggestions it was human error.

In an e-mail sent to ZDNet Asia on Friday, a day after the site outage, a company spokesperson said "linkedin.com" was not accessible to a majority of its members due to an error by the company that manages LinkedIn's domain name.

"[It's] not due to malicious activity of any kind. Our team was able to quickly address the issue, and our site has returned to normal. We believe that at no point was any LinkedIn member data compromised in any way," the company said.

The business social network went down early Thursday morning when the site was inaccessible for at least half a day. In a tweet on Thursday at 9.43am Singapore time, LinkedIn said then without elaborating on details: "Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience."

App.net's co-founder Bryan Berg had suggested the service was "hijacked" and due to the lack of SSL security on the site, it meant if a user visited the page, "[his] browser sent [his] long-lived session cookies in plain text", potentially enabling third-parties to access user information and accounts.

A user on Hacker News claiming to work with LinkedIn network operations center, however, pointed out the outage was due to a mistake from the social network's DNS provider, which accidentally pointed the Web site's homepage to a domain parking page, stating the LinkedIn.com domain was up for sale.

Some users were greeting with a domain sale page when trying to access LinkedIn's homepage. (Source: The Next Web)

When approached by ZDNet Asia, LinkedIn then said: "[We are] experiencing some intermittent issues due to a DNS issue. Our team is working on it right now and we hope to have the issues resolved as soon as possible."